Curioblog; unusual gifts, gadgets
and curiosities blog

How is it possible no designer had ever thought of this before?

The box is flat as well

In 1879 Edison contributed to the development of incandescent lighting by producing a practical and viable light bulb, that shone for 48 hours straight. Practical and viable? Maybe for its time it was, but a contrivance made of round glass that overheats in less than 5 minutes isn’t exactly practical. Plus the light bulb is a fairly inefficient device: 90% of the light it produces is transformed into heat and only the remaining 10% is used to give light.

Becoming a multitasker is easy

Office workers fighting flab

Multitaskers are those fortunate beings that have learned that: carrying out two or three different tasks simultaneously affords them that marvelous luxury called free time. For those of us who know that talking on the phone with that supplier who never sends an invoice is the perfect moment to give yourself a pedicure, or for athletes who ride their bikes to the office, there are some inventions that will make you cry in gratitude.

If when you open Elle you’re horrified to find a legion of perfect bodies, while you yourself are condemned to grow fat sitting 12 hours a day in that damned swivel chair; your prayers have just been answered.

It’s up to you to make sure you get a few extra minutes of sleep

Don’t fall asleep!

Workdays in the 21st Century would no doubt have made a 19th Century English miner want to strike.

This work-centered lifestyle has reached its utmost expression in Japan, where, aside from inventing gadgets to get a few minute’s of sleep on every imaginable occasion, they’ve also coined the phrase death by overwork: karōshi. We don’t just work too many hours, we also refuse to give up staying out late on weekdays, and the result is that we end up sleeping fewer and fewer hours and sleep deprivation haunts us like our worst nightmare.

This Japanese artist creates complex geometrical shapes out of folded paper

Paper heart

Haruki Nakamura is an expert in Origami, a Japanese art that consists of creating figures by folding pieces of paper. What’s interesting about Origami is that no glue or staples are used in order to make these figures; they are created using nothing but folds. The folds must be hidden so that the final product will be perfectly seamless, which makes this technique a veritable work of engineering.

A tin can cactus, a flower growing out of an eggshell or a plant that moves around the house and looks for the spot that gets the most light. Which do you need?

A petunia growing out of an egg?

A while back we told you about EasyBloom, a flower shaped device that analyzes your ecosystem and gives you advice on what sort of plants you should grow in your home or garden. But if you’re still not ready to don stout gloves and sturdy boots and grab the hedge trimmer, that is, if you’re utterly incompetent as a gardener , we recommend you read the descriptions of these curious plants.

A Frenchman creates Martian shaped mosaics and sticks them onto street furniture in cities all over the world

A pixelated martian

There’s a new addition to that peculiar urban art that includes graffiti, stickers, stencils and trompe l’oeil Martian mosaics created by a French urban artist. His tiles are scattered all over the world. You can see them in big cities such as Hong Kong, New York or London, and also in some smaller cities such as Bilbao, Lyon and Cologne.

Three giant colorful cubes indicate the day, month and year. A new invention that uses simple Lego “technology”

Who would’ve thought that such a normal everyday action as insignificant as fitting two things together would give birth to one of the most successful and celebrated inventions in history: Lego toys.

They were invented in Denmark in 1934, in fact the word Lego is derived from the Danish “Led Godt”, which means, “Play well”. A carpenter named Ole Kira came up with the idea and began producing miniature versions of his products in order to promote his business.

These toys reproduce moments from everyday life such as peeling a banana or opening a vacuum-packed container

Mugen Edamame: Soybean Pinching Keychain

Opening a hermetically sealed glass bottle is an everyday action from which many people derive a certain amount of pleasure, although they don’t really know why. Is it that “pop” sound the stopper makes when it opens and lets the air out? We all know the simple act of opening a bottle is itself insignificant, but, if you find a hidden and incomprehensible pleasure in it, why not repeat it over and over again anytime and anywhere? Infinite Toys reproduce those absurd moments you so enjoy with the sole aim of entertaining and pleasing you.

This Italian artist recovers antique objects to add shape and color to his lamps

Vespa Lamp, part of the Fantastic Lights series

Maurizio Lamponi is an artist from Milan who makes lamps and sculptures by recycling everyday refuse and objects. The resulting pieces are implausible, extravagant and very original.

Lamponi is not the first artist to have noticed the specially beauty of everyday objects. In Berlin, for instance, there’s the Museum of Things, a space that features some of the everyday objects that have surrounded us since the start of the 20th Century.

When you download this free software you’ll be able to use a Polaroid camera again

A camera like this one will generate your Polaroid snapshots

Some months ago the Polaroid company announced a sad bit of news: they would to stop producing film for their instant cameras, thus abandoning the technology that made them famous. Polaroid has already shut down factories in the US, Mexico and Holland and the company estimates that by 2009 all existing material will have been used up.

The instant cameras’ fans and followers did not take this news very well; many had thought this cult item would survive the digital era… and, in a certain sense, it has.